KVR Audio

Jonathan Shepherd · Post by **Jonathan Shepherd** » Thu May 10, 2018 12:38 pm

Great work man. Some FM gui layouts are a bit much for me but Aurora makes it easy. I dig the modulation possibilities, which Ive barely explored. Two thumbs up.

Hez · Post by **Hez** » Thu May 10, 2018 1:18 pm

Just played around for a little while and the GUI is more usable and intuitive than I expected actually, it looked fairly overwhelming at first glance.

The colour coding is useful in some respects, but also leads to a few situations where the font is annoyingly hard to read in certain areas. Some of the black mod source labels over the blacker regions of the gradients are nigh on illegible.

So far really enjoying it though. I support your decision to go for pure FM - I realised recently that I am terrible at FM synthesis in part because I mainly experiment with tools like Sytrus and always default to my comfort zone of sculpting with the filters or ridiculous oscillator shapes or whatever. I feel like being encouraged to focus on the simple sine operators and their envelopes will get me much more mileage out of the fundamentals of FM and look forward to spending more time with a more 'classic' design like this.

Only very minor feature request so far is it would be great to have a control to scale envelope lengths (unless it's there already)? I.e. all segments of the envelope are scaled by an equal multiplier with a control that goes from e.g. 0.1x to 10x. I dislike having to modify all 4 or 5 stages of an envelope to make it a bit longer when I'm relatively happy with the shape as is, always feels like a workflow killer.

RyFi · Post by **RyFi** » Thu May 10, 2018 6:17 pm

Jonathan Shepherd wrote:Great work man. Some FM gui layouts are a bit much for me but Aurora makes it easy. I dig the modulation possibilities, which Ive barely explored. Two thumbs up.

Awesome, happy to hear it! Thanks so much.

Roman Wisniak · Post by **Roman Wisniak** » Thu May 10, 2018 6:32 pm

Thanks for update!

Now we really need chorus and stereo version of delay FX.

RyFi · Post by **RyFi** » Thu May 10, 2018 6:34 pm

Hez wrote:Just played around for a little while and the GUI is more usable and intuitive than I expected actually, it looked fairly overwhelming at first glance.

That's great to hear. I know it kind of looks like a control panel on an alien spaceship at first, but like you discovered, I've really tried to make it logical and sensible and I think it's a darn-near optimal layout and anyone should feel right at home about 2 minutes into using it.

The colour coding is useful in some respects, but also leads to a few situations where the font is annoyingly hard to read in certain areas. Some of the black mod source labels over the blacker regions of the gradients are nigh on illegible.

Yeah, those darn mod source labels... I agree. Ok, message received, I can and will do better on those.

So far really enjoying it though. I support your decision to go for pure FM - I realised recently that I am terrible at FM synthesis in part because I mainly experiment with tools like Sytrus and always default to my comfort zone of sculpting with the filters or ridiculous oscillator shapes or whatever. I feel like being encouraged to focus on the simple sine operators and their envelopes will get me much more mileage out of the fundamentals of FM and look forward to spending more time with a more 'classic' design like this.

This is exactly it. You get it. Thanks. Pure FM is its own very awesome thing and it doesn't need to make any concessions to subtractive synthesis. I didn't know a lick about programming FM when I started creating patches on early versions of my own synth (heh), but the principles are simple and if you just force yourself to stick to the FM playbook then you'll get good at it quick and really find that it's a lot of fun. I think the FM character is something special and it rightfully stands as its own unique thing.

Only very minor feature request so far is it would be great to have a control to scale envelope lengths (unless it's there already)? I.e. all segments of the envelope are scaled by an equal multiplier with a control that goes from e.g. 0.1x to 10x. I dislike having to modify all 4 or 5 stages of an envelope to make it a bit longer when I'm relatively happy with the shape as is, always feels like a workflow killer.

I get what you're saying. In an earlier version I actually had a parameter/control for an envelope scaling factor (0.5 / 1 / 2 / 4x), but I removed it because it didn't make as much sense as I had in my mind. Here's the reason: the envelopes will then be in different timescales and they won't visually correspond to one another. This is antithetical to good visual feedback. An envelope that appears shorter could actually be longer than the others depending on what its separate scaling factor is set to.

I can't support re-implementing that kind of scaling system, but you did give me an idea that I never had until now: I could add a modifier key combination that would let you adjust all the stage times together!

How does that sound to you?

RyFi · Post by **RyFi** » Thu May 10, 2018 6:37 pm

Roman Wisniak wrote:Thanks for update! Now we really need chorus and stereo version of delay FX.

My pleasure! And I think once I'm caught up on the last few more important things then I'll start working on a chorus.

gentleclockdivider · Post by **gentleclockdivider** » Thu May 10, 2018 7:11 pm

Instant crash in renoise , gui related , result : no sound
Also instant crash in reaper .
32 bit version
32 bit windows

RyFi · Post by **RyFi** » Thu May 10, 2018 7:43 pm

Drat. Sorry about that.

I test in Reaper 32-bit on Windows 10 64-bit and there are no problems there.

I also just downloaded the Renoise demo (whoa, crazy program! :-S), and figured out how to do a basic check and I had no problems with my synth there either.

It's looking like it's a Windows-related issue more than anything. What version of Windows are you using? What's your CPU?

skyscape · Post by **skyscape** » Fri May 11, 2018 3:02 am

gentleclockdivider wrote:Instant crash in renoise , gui related , result : no sound
Also instant crash in reaper .
32 bit version
32 bit windows

I've been running this (and previous) versions in Renoise 3.1.1 without any issues at all. Also just checked the 32 bit version and it seems to be working fine here.

gentleclockdivider · Post by **gentleclockdivider** » Fri May 11, 2018 4:29 pm

Vista 32 bit , don't ask

RyFi · Post by **RyFi** » Fri May 11, 2018 6:33 pm

gentleclockdivider wrote:Vista 32 bit , don't ask

I know this isn't what you want to hear, but figuring this out is going to be a problem. My synth's SDK target IS Vista (there are no Windows features newer than Vista that I need to use), so it SHOULD work on Vista, but clearly it's not. I think you're the first person trying to run this sub-Windows 7.

I really don't have any way of troubleshooting this. I don't have access to a Vista instance I can test with, but I can see if anyone I know does...

The only thing I can think of right now is: can you please check your Windows Event Viewer log and tell me what information is given about the crash events? It's a starting point at least.

RyFi · Post by **RyFi** » Fri May 11, 2018 10:22 pm

New version up. Yet more operator mod source readability improvements, and new multi-stage time edit mode: Shift + LMB to scale time of all subsequent stages simultaneously.

urlwolf · Post by **urlwolf** » Sat May 12, 2018 5:17 am

I have a good feeling about this one. Dev is very responsive and has a clear vision.

Roman Wisniak · Post by **Roman Wisniak** » Sat May 12, 2018 10:00 am

urlwolf wrote:I have a good feeling about this one. Dev is very responsive and has a clear vision.

+1

I have great feedback from dev too.
Aurora is a nice FM synth with highly readable and understandable GUI structure. I percieve it as a great strengh over other existing FM vsti's available.

fmr · Post by **fmr** » Sat May 12, 2018 10:22 am

jens wrote:
fmr wrote:I still cannot understand why people keep following the DX7 paradigm. Even Yamaha had gone beyond that long ago, first with the DX5/DX1 followed by the DX7 II (which layered two FM elements, because clearly, one single FM element was too short), then with the TX816 (which could layer up to eight FM elements), followed by the SY77/TG77/SY99 (more algorithms, more waveforms, up to four FM layers, or combination of FM and PCM layers, interaction with samples), and later with FS1R. Still, programmers seem to think that there is something magical in the DX7
And yet for the - imo - best FM synth they have ever made they pretty much went back to that early concept (and made it far more accessible).

Get informed or lost.

I am well informed, thank you (the "best FM synth" statement clearly shows that you're biased. and I don't discuss with biased people). You are entitled to your opinion as I am to mine (and I am certainly not alone in it). If the author likes it, good for him. I just wanted to bring attention to a whole world outside this paradigm.

Anyway, this doesn't bring anything to me. I'm out

Aurora FM - New Win(32/64) VSTi FM synthesizer - Introductory pricing